Coders of the world, unite: can Silicon Valley workers curb the power of Big Tech?

The long read: For decades, tech companies promised to make the world better. As that dream falls apart, disillusioned insiders are trying to take back control

Big Tech is broken. Suddenly, a wide range of journalists and politicians agree on this. For decades, most of the media and political establishment accepted Silicon Valley’s promise that it would not “be evil,” as the first Google code of corporate conduct put it. But the past few months have brought a constant stream of negative stories about both the internal culture of the tech industry and the effect it is having on society.

It is difficult to know where to begin. How about the rampant sexual harassment at companies such as Uber, which fired 20 employees in June after receiving hundreds of sexual harassment claims? Or the growing body of evidence that women and people of colour are not only dramatically underrepresented at tech firms, but also systematically underpaid, as three Google employees alleged in a lawsuit last month? Should we focus on the fact that Facebook allowed advertisers to target users who listed “Jew hater” as one of their interests? Or that they and Google have helped clients to spread fake news?

In response to concerns about Russian interference in the 2016 election, politicians are threatening to take action against companies they have long left alone. By late September this year, when the Senate intelligence committee demanded that Facebook, Google and Twitter conduct internal investigations – and those companies admitted that, yes, foreign actors had used their platforms to communicate misinformation that was viewed millions of times by voters in hotly contested swing states – it seemed fair to ask whether democracy could survive them. A New York Times headline on 13 October captured how the mood had shifted: “Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend.”

It is tempting to turn this shift of mood against Big Tech into a story of betrayal. On 1 November, representatives of Facebook and Twitter will appear before the Senate to testify about divisive political advertising paid for by Russian actors on their platforms. The setting suggests wrongdoing and retribution. But the drama playing out involves more than uncovering specific lies or misdeeds. We are watching an entire worldview start to fall apart.

The idea that computer networks are inherently democratic and democratising has deep roots in the counterculture that emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Hippies and rebels such as Stewart Brand claimed personal computing as an instrument for personal liberation. Their pronouncements inspired many of the first tech entrepreneurs, and as the industry matured, it continued to use their rhetoric. It would allow users to – as the Apple slogan put it – Think Different.

The Californian Ideology, as two British media theorists dubbed it in the 1990s, combined personal liberty with market deregulation. A core tenet was that platforms such as Google and Facebook were politically neutral. They were tools for political expression but had no politics themselves. They would increase voting, but not affect it. Industry leaders espoused values that anyone could embrace: sharing, connection, community, openness, expression. The language they spoke was the language of a universal humanism – or, as Mark Zuckerberg put it in the title of a 6,000-word Facebook post that he published in February, “Global Community”.

These concepts might have sounded vague, but they produced concrete political outcomes. They convinced politicians to privatise public goods – starting with the internet itself. In the 1990s, a network created largely by government researchers and public money was delivered into private hands and protected from regulation. Built on this enclosed ground, a company like Facebook could turn formerly non-economic activities – chatting with a friend, or showing her a picture of your kid or crush – into a source of seemingly endless profit. Not by chance, the values that these companies touted as intrinsic goods – openness, connectivity, deregulation – were also the operating principles that made their owners rich.

As with most successful ideologies, the Californian Ideology did not look political. Despite its internal contradictions, for decades, it remained invisible and intuitive: a form of common sense. It allowed Silicon Valley to reshape markets and labour, political and social life all over the world, more or less unquestioned – until now.

As we approach the anniversary of Trump’s election, it is not just activists, journalists and politicians who are increasingly sceptical about the tech industry. A growing number of people within it are beginning to question its core values. After Bloomberg reported in October that Facebook and Google ad teams had helped spread racist fake news defaming refugees in crucial swing states, someone at Facebook posted the story in an internal discussion channel that company employees use during the day. “Responding to everything with ‘we’re an open platform’ is getting tiring,” one colleague commented.

As the ideas that have animated tech companies for decades come under attack, a new set of intuitions is emerging among tech workers. Not all employees at Big Tech firms take responsibility for what has happened; many see themselves as the victims of politicians and journalists who need scapegoats for the mess of the last election and their failure to anticipate it. But even they recognise that digital platforms have become inextricably entangled in the political process. It is not just that bad actors have hijacked digital platforms and used them to bad ends. It is that the platforms themselves are inherently political – and their politics need to change.

Some Democrats, such as Senator Mark Warner – and some far-right figures such as Steve Bannon – are arguing that the answer is more government regulation. They want to break up the tech monopolies through antitrust lawsuits. But these initiatives face many obstacles. Existing antitrust laws focus on keeping consumer prices low; they are ill-suited to deal with tech monopolies, which give users what they give us free or cheap. And at present, there isn’t much political will to enforce regulation. Despite all the negative press, favourability polls for Facebook, Google and Amazon still give them approval ratings of 60, 82 and 88% respectively.

Recognising these difficulties, a growing number of activists within the industry are developing a different plan. Their insight is as compelling as it is counterintuitive: the best people to confront the power of the tech giants may be their own employees. First, they want to teach their colleagues to see that tech work is work, even though it doesn’t take place in a factory. Then, they want to organise them, so that rank-and-file workers can begin to bring political transparency and democratic accountability to the platforms they have worked to build. Call them the Tech Left.

Before the election, the tech industry was more likely to be the target of protests than it was to organise them. Over the past few years, residents of the Bay Area have become accustomed to activists decrying the ways in which tech companies are gentrifying their neighbourhoods. But following the election of Donald Trump, many members of the tech industry became politicised. The protested became protesters. In January, thousands of tech workers flooded the streets of San Francisco and Oakland to protest the inauguration and to participate in the Women’s March. On 28 January, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, showed up at San Francisco International Airport to decry Trump’s “Muslim ban.” So did Sam Altman, the president of the influential startup incubator, Y-Combinator. Two days later, more than 2,000 Google employees walked off the job in eight different offices worldwide in response to Trump’s revised travel ban.

It is not surprising that tech CEOs would oppose Trump. The Bay Area has long served as a fundraising stop for Democratic politicians. During the Obama years, ties between Big Tech and the Democratic party grew closer. According to the watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, between the 2009 inauguration and August 2016, 250 people moved either from Google to the White House or vice versa. The Hillary Clinton campaign was supposed to build on Obama’s online organising tactics, and most tech leaders supported her, too.

In the wake of Clinton’s defeat, several startups have tried to turn tech money and tech methods to the project of getting Democrats elected. In November 2016, the investor and philanthropist Swati Mylavarapu and Obama alumnus Ravi Gupta founded The Arena, an “accelerator for politics”, to invest in new progressive organisations. Mylavarapu had been donating extensively to Democrats after her husband sold his startup Nest Labs to Google in 2014. But she felt dissatisfied. “I was looking for who is representing the future, and I didn’t see any opportunities,” she told me in March. Mylavarapu wanted to translate her experiences in venture capital into politics. “Would you just have a venture profile that was backing long-term incumbent serial entrepreneurs? No. Sometimes you take a bet on the potential game-changing up-and-comer.”

The Arena has been joined by a number of similarly minded organisations. In July, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Marc Pincus of Zynga founded Win the Future (WTF), a fund with vague plans to “rewire the Democratic party”. In September, an organisation called Engage Progress launched, with the aim of strengthening democracy “by providing and training people to effectively use digital tools”.

Instead, they repeat familiar Big Tech credos. They emphasise infrastructure and procedure. They assert that more technology means more democracy. In March, I attended a summit for The Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina. Panellists and speeches returned again and again to the language of “community”, “progressives”, “like-minded people” and “our values”. The unspoken questions remained: We who? Which values? In two full days, nobody on stage mentioned the rift between the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton wings of the party.

If the goal is to get more Democrats elected, the approach of the venture capitalists might work, or it might not. Either way, it is not new. As the sense of crisis around the industry deepens, organisations trying to fight Trump using the same tools that brought him to power recall the old line about the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The Tech Left says that in order to achieve lasting change they cannot simply train tech tools on politics. Instead, they want to turn inward and change the politics of technology itself.

The Tech Left believes it must urgently transform the industry in order to stop it from serving nefarious ends. It is not focused on getting Democratic politicians elected. On the contrary, much of the Tech Left distrusts mainstream Democrats. It does not believe that more engagement with digital tools necessarily means more democracy, or that the tech industry will necessarily lead the way to social progress. It is sceptical that people who became billionaires under the current system will transform that system. Instead of venture capital, the Tech Left talks about worker power, believing that the best chance to reform these companies will come from people who work there.

The most radical Tech Left group got started before Trump emerged as a major force in national politics: Tech Workers Coalition, or TWC. It started with a friendship between Rachel Melendes, a cafeteria worker turned professional organiser, and Matt Schaefer, an engineer. The first meetings, in 2014 and 2015, were small and informal; members gathered around once a month, at each another’s apartments. In these modest settings, they undertook an ambitious project: forging an alternative to the Californian Ideology. To do so, they focused on an element of the economy that Silicon Valley rarely mentions: labour.

The name Tech Workers Coalition contains two provocations. The first is to recognise that what engineers do is work. Many aspects of life in Silicon Valley, from casual dress codes to horizontal management structures, are designed to discourage white-collar employees from seeing themselves as workers. Tech campuses offer the conveniences, and atmosphere, of a privileged childhood: cafeterias and cleaning services and gym classes; candy dispensers and dinosaur sculptures and even indoor jungle gyms. These perks encourage employees to spend more and more of their time at work, or even to erase the boundaries between life and work altogether. They also encourage people to think of themselves as potential founders or venture capitalists investing in their futures, rather than workers performing tasks in order to draw a wage.

The second idea is that white-collar professionals are not the only tech workers. According to the advocacy group Silicon Valley Rising, for every engineer who gets hired, three to four more lower-wage jobs get created. Large tech campuses separate their white-collar workers from the blue-collar workers who cook and serve their food, clean their floors and stand guard outside their doors; the latter are usually brought in by independent contractors. But they are all part of the same industry.

The media tends to pay attention to the most privileged tech workers. But, as Ares Geovanos, a TWC member who works in research and development at a large tech company in the South Bay, pointed out to me: “Not every engineer is a Stanford CS grad at Google making $200,000 a year.” More and more engineers, even at big companies like Facebook, work on temporary contracts, without benefits. The environment at startups is worse: employees often work for equity that turns out to be worthless. (The vast majority of startups fail, even when they are well funded.) The median salary for American IT workers is $81,000 – well above the median salary overall ($59,039, as of September), but far from the 1%.

Engineers are not immune to the forces of capitalism, in other words. The downward pressures that are driving more and more millennials to identify as “working class” affect graduates with degrees in science and technology, too. These pressures are especially extreme in the Bay Area, where you can make $100,000 a year and still struggle to make rent, particularly if you’re paying off tens of thousands of dollars of student debt, or supporting partners or children. The white-collar workers in TWC know they are the lucky ones. Knowing this, while still struggling, has helped radicalise them.

Disillusionment can also be a powerful recruiting tool. Many engineers chose their careers because they sincerely believed the Californian Ideology – or, at least, the promise that tech was going to change the world for the better. “I think that there’s a growing sense of, OK, we came to work in tech because we thought that we were bringing value to society through the internet, because the internet is such a democratising thing,” said Paige Panter, a TWC member who works as a product manager at a startup. “Then we went through layoffs. You start to realise: ‘Maybe our company is only delivering value for these venture capitalists.’”

For many tech workers, Trump’s victory accelerated the process of disillusionment, and even horror. They had built the tools that spread fake news, and the tools that the “alt-right” had used to recruit support. They felt grim at the prospect that Trump’s administration could use digital products they had built to run surveillance on immigrants and critics.

For many, 14 December 2016 marked a turning point. That day, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg trekked to Trump Tower for a meeting – brokered by the widely loathed billionaire investor Peter Thiel – with the president-elect. The photos that came out of this so-called Tech Summit were another wake-up call. “Either they are going to be the face of the industry, or someone else is,” Maciej Ceglowski, the founder and CEO of the social bookmarking website Pinboard, recalled thinking, when I interviewed him in January.

Several weeks after the election, Ceglowski organised a “meetup” with the comedian Heather Gold, calling it Tech Solidarity. More than 100 people attended, to listen to speakers from community groups. Soon, Ceglowski and Gold started flying all over the US, hosting gatherings in Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, Durham, Chicago and Washington DC. They raised tens of thousands of dollars for legal aid and connected people with engineering skills to nonprofits.

Amid these efforts, the TWC rapidly attracted new members. Their earliest actions, in 2015, had focused on winning a union for hotel workers at a Hyatt in Santa Clara, where tech companies often hosted conferences and put up visitors. Now they turned their attention to engineering work itself.

On 18 January, the group staged a protest at Palantir, the secretive data analytics company that Peter Thiel founded, to highlight the aggressive surveillance programs it ran for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Employees from Facebook, Google, Intel, Cisco and Stripe, the mobile payments company, showed up. So did a few older Palo Alto residents (the kinds of 60s veterans who call these actions “demos”), and a handful of Stanford students – about 70 people in total. In the chilling rain, two TWC members unfurled a black vinyl banner on which white tape spelled out TECH WORKERS DEMAND JUSTICE. (When several dozen TWC members marched behind the same banner on 1 May, in San Francisco’s annual May Day parade, members of labour and immigrants’ rights groups approached them and asked to take a picture, joking: “It’s about time.”)

There are currently nearly 500 people in the Tech Workers Coalition group on Slack, the workplace communications tool they use to organise and chat. There are nascent chapters in other cities, including Seattle, Boston and New York. And other leftist organisations are paying attention. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, many engineers supported the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders – Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and IBM were among the companies whose employees made the highest number of donations to his campaign. Now, socialist organisations are recruiting from tech. One of the largest is the Democratic Socialists of America, which has grown from 7,000 to more than 30,000 members in less than 12 months.

In New York, which has one of the largest DSA chapters in the country, a group calling itself Tech Action started meeting in January. They were, the co-chair Will Luckman said, “very aware” of Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity. “These big tech companies are consolidating control over all these aspects of our society,” Luckman told me. “It’s important to organise those workers now so that they can push back internally.” He is not discouraged by recent signs that many white male tech workers may tend toward the right – like the memo by ex-Google employee James Damore questioning the company’s diversity policies, or the recent expose about a Seattle area Nazi meetup, which revealed that many of the participants studied or worked in tech.

“There’s a pernicious capitalist libertarianism that pervades a lot of this stuff,” Luckman said. “But a lot of a socialist ideology lends itself to the web and these technologies. We just need to present a better alternative.”

What would that alternative look like? First, it would entail acknowledging that platforms are political. Banal engineering decisions have political consequences. Using upvotes or downvotes instead of likes, for instance, can silence marginalised voices on a platform. Whether or not the engineer working on a messenger app encrypts messages sent through that app will affect how easily the state can use it to spy on critics. The same goes for decisions about how long to store user data.

Given the political consequence of such decisions, both Tech Solidarity and Tech Workers Coalition say they want to bring Big Tech under more democratic control. And they argue that the best way to do so is by unionising engineers.

In an interview with Logic magazine in June, Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard laid out all the reasons why the usual methods that the public has used to exert pressure on large companies will not work in the case of platforms like Google or Facebook.

First, boycotts are unlikely to be effective. Many big tech companies are near-monopolies. Facebook is fun because everyone you know is on Facebook. The Google algorithm works well because everyone uses it to Google things. If Amazon has put all your local stores out of business, it is not so easy to take your business elsewhere. A growing number of gig-economy jobs rely on apps built on top of these platforms. Social media networks are used for background checks on everything from job applications to renting a place to stay. They have become part of the infrastructure of everyday life – like electricity or running water.

In short, for most people, the social costs of leaving would be too high. Shareholder revolts would be tricky to pull off, too, even if shareholders were interested in revolting. Many tech companies have a corporate structure that gives their founders an extraordinary amount of control. “That really just leaves the employees,” Ceglowski concluded.

But what can the employees do to bring Big Tech under control? There have been previous attempts to organise labour in Silicon Valley. Starting in the mid-1970s, several unions tried to recruit silicon-chip manufacturers. In the 1980s, there were similar efforts with engineers. None got far. The difficulty came from the novel business structures and practices Silicon Valley was developing. Rather than signing up to spend decades at a single firm, people changed jobs constantly, moving horizontally within dense social networks.

Today, short job tenures remain the norm: the average tech employee stays in their position for a little over a year. This makes it difficult to build the kinds of bonds within a workplace that facilitate organising. It creates strong incentives against getting known as a troublemaker. Tech workplaces also blur the traditional boundaries between workers and management. One member of TWC, Judy Tuan, was employed as an engineering manager at the crowdfunding website Indiegogo when she applied to attend training sessions by the International Workers of the World; she wanted to learn how to organise colleagues around social justice issues. Initially, the IWW refused to admit her. Although her job title included the word “manager”, she had never thought of herself that way. “The manager is like: I’m not here to tell you what to do; I’m here to try to anticipate what’s going to hold you back and remove those things,” said Tuan. She did talk her way in, and the experience made her even more sceptical about the feelgood language of the California ideology. (She has since left Indiegogo and now teaches at a coding school in Oakland.)

Martin Manning, a former Silicon Valley labour organiser who served as assistant secretary of labour for Bill Clinton, believes unionising engineers is impossible. “It isn’t to say a group of engineers with concerns about privacy, AI, anything, shouldn’t be getting together and sharing those concerns,” he told me. “But they should think about a professional organisation.” Manning believes that engineers should establish codes of conduct, like doctors or librarians. (There was one such organisation in the 1980s, called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.)

In the 1980s, when he attempted to organise engineers, Manning found “it wasn’t very fertile territory. It wasn’t like standing outside a factory where every third guy who walks out is pissed at his boss”. Leslie Berlin, who runs the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, concurred, summing up the views of Apple employees from that era: “Why would we want a union, when we get everything we want without a union?”

But TWC and Tech Solidarity point out that the privileged position of engineers cuts both ways. They are relatively few in number and critical to the operations of algorithms that, in some cases, serve millions of users every day. Whether their activities take the form of a union or a professional association, the structure of the tech industry gives them special bargaining power.

The immense wealth the tech industry has generated in the past decade is based on the ability of software to scale rapidly. In the 1950s, when a company like Ford wanted to grow, they had to make huge investments in fixed capital, such as factory assembly lines, and materials, such as steel, in order to build enough cars to meet demand. But digital storage is cheap, and cloud computing makes it possible to run web apps at low cost, so that going from one to 10 or 10 million users requires relatively little capital.

The tech giants therefore can aim to attract limitless numbers of users while relying on relatively few direct employees. Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought the company for $1bn; WhatsApp had 55 when Facebook bought it for $19bn. According to the most recent figures, Facebook employs 17,048 people, for more than 2 billion monthly users. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, employs 78,801, who make possible trillions of searches every year. Together, Google and Facebook receive around 70% of advertising revenue worldwide.

This kind of scale means these companies can make extraordinarily high profits. But it also means the core workers they rely on have an extraordinary amount of bargaining power. It would not take very many engineers walking off the job to shut the Google search engine down.

Big Tech companies are increasingly contracting out work in areas such as data analysis and content moderation. But software engineering remains difficult to outsource. It is time-consuming to hire engineers and to train them to use internal company tools. Workers in that role can, therefore, seem untouchable. One of the organisers of TWC’s Palantir protest told me that after he talked to the press, HR at his company threatened him. “I thought I would be in trouble at work for activism, and sometimes it seemed like that,” he said. “But so far it’s been fine. I’ve been promoted.”

So far, the most tangible achievements of TWC have been in the area where the organisation began: supporting blue-collar workers in their right to organise. Over the past several years, traditional labour unions have made strong headway with shuttle drivers, security guards and cafeteria workers in Silicon Valley. In early 2017, several TWC members decided to help the labour union Unite Here organise cafeteria staff at the tech campuses where they worked, including Facebook.

This help took different forms. A few TWC members spent Saturdays with professional Unite Here organisers, making house visits and attending a regular roundtable meeting. They listened while several dozen people shared stories about the hardships of working for low wages in a region where the costs of living were racing up – about one-bedroom apartments shared by a dozen family members, two- or three-hour commutes started well before dawn, and fears for their health and for their children. People wept. The TWC members promised their support. If the contractor who employed the cafeteria workers, Flagship Facility Services, retaliated, the engineers said they would appeal to their bosses. (Cafeteria staff members do not work directly for Facebook, but TWC and Unite Here rightly perceived that they could pressure Facebook into adopting a “neutral” stance, influencing how Flagship handled the situation.)

TWC engineers took small steps during the week, too. Some put pro-union stickers on their laptops and gave them to sympathetic colleagues so they could identify one another across the open floor. They slipped surveys and flyers, in English and Spanish, to janitorial and cafeteria staff. At weekly all-hands meetings, they asked their bosses, in front of everyone: would they respect the rights of all their workers to take off and march on May Day? As they started getting bolder, they brought Unite Here organisers on to campus, signing them in as their guests.

What TWC was doing required different skills from those Democratic startups trying to “reboot democracy”. The daily work of organising takes time. TWC members shyly struck up conversations with the people who cooked and served their meals and cleaned up after them. “It can be awkward,” one soft-spoken engineer told me. “We’re so much more used to messaging and texting.” On Facebook he posted an open call to friends, suggesting that they call one another on the phone more often, to practise speaking.

By late spring, things were coming to a head at Facebook. In the afternoons, TWC members were camping out in a Starbucks near where the largest Facebook cafeteria lets out. There they sat with Unite Here organisers and waited for cafeteria staff to come sign union cards – the process US workers have to go through in order to win union recognition. By June, Unite Here had signed up 500 workers, and in July, they announced that the Facebook cafeteria workers had officially joined the local chapter of Unite Here. The mood was ebullient. One TWC member promptly flew to Seattle, where he met with the local Tech Solidarity chapter; in August, with the Service Employees International Union, they brought more than 150 tech workers to the Amazon campus to demand that security guards there get a union, too.

In July, I spoke with Sam Khaleed, a fortysomething cook in the main cafeteria who has been nicknamed “The Sauce” ever since he was in high school in Oakland. Keeping his baseball cap and sunglasses on, he told me about his hopes and fears. Most had to do with his teenage son. He has a tattoo of the two of them, posing in front of the Bay Bridge, on his right forearm; he held it out to show me, along with scars he has got from cooking, when sizzling oil leaps out of his pan.

Khaleed is proud of the work he does, and deeply grateful for the union. At first, he found it difficult to talk about his anxieties with coworkers at the roundtable. But he came to find it comforting: “We have solidarity, now.” A cost-of-living raise would mean more security, and a better chance of staying in the apartment where he lives. Khaleed deeply wants to be able to live near his son, and for his son to continue going to the good public school he now attends.

When I asked Khaleed how he felt about the two TWC Facebook employees he had met with, his voice faltered. “I just hope that someday I can help them like they helped me.” When I told one of the engineers, he smiled, and quoted the IWW slogan. “That’s the goal, right – one big union?”

If organising the cafeteria workers is supposed to be the first stage, organising tech workers remains a longer-term goal. A sceptic might describe it as a fantasy. How far the engineers who show up to TWC and Tech Solidarity meetings can unite with the people who serve them lunch remains an open question. They might all work in the same industry, and they might all live primarily from wages they earn rather than capital they own or invest. But their lives are very different. For now, Facebook engineers can get a decent salary and healthcare and vacation without having to fight hard. But this scepticism itself reflects how our understanding of the purpose of organising labour has narrowed over recent decades.

Against this diminishment, the Tech Left, and the broader young American left, are reviving a more ambitious vision. This vision says that the point of solidarity was never just to get a few more cents per hour, or a few more days off per year. It was to create conditions under which real democracy might be possible. Labour organising took off in the US during our last Gilded Age, when – as now – extraordinary amounts of wealth became concentrated in a few hands. Back in the late 19th century, that wealth was generated by industrialisation and transportation networks; today, it comes from digitisation and communication networks. What was at stake then is at stake now, too: the possibility of collectively shaping the world we must live in together. Politicians are moving to reform the infrastructure that connects us. But the people building that infrastructure may be in the best position to do it.

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